NOTE: An update has been added below, using the press release that came out today after the news stories yesterday.

While ironic that something designed to reduce CO2 emissions (and presumably warming)is actually producing warming around it, this isn’t really any big surprise. Orchardists and vineyard operators in California have been using motor driven wind turbines to elevate local temperatures to save crops from frost for over half a century. What is different here is the scale of nighttime warming, large enough to be visible on MODIS satellite imagery thanks to large scale wind farms.

Large scale wind turbine farm in the Oklahoma panhandle. I had just visited a USHCN climate monitoring station about 2 miles downwind when I took this photo in December of 2008.

Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. and associates have been doing research along these lines for quite some time, and has this summary on some recent research.

From Louise Gray in the Telegraph:

Wind farms can cause climate change, according to new research, that shows for the first time the new technology is already pushing up temperatures.

Usually at night the air closer to the ground becomes colder when the sun goes down and the earth cools. But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature.

Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built. This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms. It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.

The wind industry in the United States has experienced a remarkably rapid expansion of capacity in recent years and this fast growth is expected to continue in the future. While converting wind’s kinetic energy into electricity, wind turbines modify surface–atmosphere exchanges and the transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the atmosphere. These changes, if spatially large enough, may have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate.

Here we present observational evidence for such impacts based on analyses of satellite data for the period of 2003–2011 over a region in west-central Texas, where four of the world’s largest wind farms are located. Our results show a significant warming trend of up to 0.72 °C per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to nearby non-wind-farm regions. We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms as its spatial pattern and magnitude couples very well with the geographic distribution of wind turbines.

h/t to WUWT reader Andrew Kissling

=====================================================

UPDATE: 4/30/12:30PM PST The press release came out this morning, including this image:

Large wind farms in certain areas in the United States appear to affect local land surface temperatures, according to a paper published today in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The study, led by Liming Zhou, an atmospheric scientist at the State University of New York- (SUNY) Albany, provides insights about the possible effects of wind farms.

The results could be important for developing efficient adaptation and management strategies to ensure long-term sustainability of wind power.

“This study indicates that land surface temperatures have warmed in the vicinity of large wind farms in west-central Texas, especially at night,” says Anjuli Bamzai, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funded the research.

“The observations and analyses are for a relatively short period, but raise important issues that deserve attention as we move toward an era of rapid growth in wind farms in our quest for alternate energy sources.”

Considerable research has linked the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels with rising global temperatures.

Consequently, many nations are moving toward cleaner sources of renewable energy such as wind turbines. Generating wind power creates no emissions, uses no water and is likely “green.”

“We need to better understand the system with observations, and better describe and model the complex processes involved, to predict how wind farms may affect future weather and climate,” said Zhou.

There have been a growing number of studies of wind farm effects on weather and climate, primarily using numerical models due to the lack of observations over wind farms.

As numerical models are computationally intensive and have uncertainties in simulating regional and local weather and climate, said Zhou, remote sensing is likely the most efficient and effective way to study wind farm effects over larger spatial and longer temporal scales.

To understand the potential impact of wind farms on local weather and climate, Zhou’s team analyzed satellite-derived land surface temperatures from regions around large wind farms in Texas for the period 2003-2011.

The researchers found a night-time warming effect over wind farms of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade over the nine-year-period in which data were collected.

Because the spatial pattern of warming mirrors the geographic distribution of wind turbines, the scientists attribute the warming primarily to wind farms.

The year-to-year land surface temperature over wind farms shows a persistent upward trend from 2003 to 2011, consistent with the increasing number of operational wind turbines with time.

“This warming effect is most likely caused by the turbulence in turbine wakes acting like fans to pull down warmer near-surface air from higher altitudes at night,” said Somnath Baidya Roy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a co-author of the paper.

While the warming effect reported is local and small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature variation, the authors believe that this work draws attention to an important scientific issue that requires further investigation.

“The estimated warming trends only apply to the study region and to the study period, and thus should not be interpolated into other regions, globally or over longer periods,” Zhou said. “For a given wind farm, once there are no new wind turbines added, the warming effect may reach a stable level.”

The study represents a first step in exploring the potential of using satellite data to quantify the possible effects of the development of big wind farms on weather and climate, said Chris Thorncroft of SUNY-Albany, a co-author of the paper.

“We’re expanding this approach to other wind farms,” said Thorncroft, “and building models to understand the physical processes and mechanisms driving the interactions of wind turbines and the atmosphere boundary layer near the surface.”

###

Other authors of the paper include Lance Bosart at SUNY-Albany, Yuhong Tian of NOAA, and Yuanlong Hu at Terra-Gen Power LLC in San Diego, Calif.

OMG 1C warmer! And we all know how utterly devastating 1C is. My goodness, it is a wonder that Texas is not under water by now, what with the huge increase in temperature it is suffering from. That must be why there is no Coral Reef in Texas. It’s too hot.

I am following the comments at the Telegraph article…… OM goodness there are so many green activists there, all wanting and pushing for green clean alternate energy sources including nuclear…… they are dumb and deaf to any who disagree

Lets save the world from warming by making it warmer!!!! Go Green! [/sarc]
Well i guess it is time to admit not only is their favorite tech not worth the wind that powers it, but now it accomplishes the exact thing it was meant to prevent. How wrong can they become in this debate?

Is this not caused by the basic thermo effect of heat being created whenever there is a conversion of one type of energy to another? Windmills convert kinetic energy to electricity. I would presume all power generation systems, e.g. coal, gas, etc. also has local heating effect?

Trees affect the local temperature at night as well, its a common enough problem with ANY kind of ground clutter. This has likely had input into UHI. Just another application of the law of thermodynamics.

That’s a no brainer. I commented on that very subject over a year ago here on a post showing offshore windmills streaming clouds behind. Then just speculating. They create turbulence breaking the smooth surface skin laminar flow which increases soil evaporation. Dry soil does get hotter, and where will you mostly see this excess in energy manifest itself… during the cooler nightime temperatures. Don’t have to be a rocket scientist to connect those dots.

This phenomenon has been known for some time but at last it’s getting traction. When we submitted against this wind farm we raised the issue of wind turbines dessicating the native forest in the area and increasing the likelihood of a catastrophic fire, we were ignored.

The paper is pay-walled so difficult to see to what extentthe observed effects impact maximum (daytime) temperature readings. But potentially very important finding since the results would seem to require that the definition of the ‘urban heat island’ (UHI) now be extended well beyond the perimeter of the surbubs and the airports…

And as the study also points-out – teh same effect is also observed in grape-growing regions which use horizontal windmills (ie. helicopters) to mix air in order to elevate ground temperatures.

Presumably maximum temperatures during short winter days will be similarly affected ie. artifically increased…?

Perhaps now time to simply accept that the land-based record has been, and increasingly is, corrupted to the point of no utility in measuring temperature change? Too many confounding/ corrupting variables in data recording, data creation (interpolation) and data analysis.

Time to assign the land-based records to the category of science fiction. The satellites are demonstrably far more dependable and far less prone to man-made sources of ‘error’.

I’m not too sure about this. The turbines are removing energy from the wind, not adding energy as in the California growers example. The turbines would be causing local effects of mixing of the layers, to be sure. If satellite data reveals increased local temps, they may be on to something.

Still, the paper makes me think that there might be something to the oft- quoted “one butterfly” example derived from Chaos Theory… all of those locally missing wing beats from churned birds, you see.

I have ceased to be surprised, I begin to wonder is there anything that AGW devotion doesn’t make worse than the problem it was supposed to solve. Reading the comments on the Telegraph site it also seems that the true believers are becoming even more dogmatic, they allow for no argument that might upset their belief that wind technology can be anything other short of wonderful. The emperor’s clothes are now openly styled and worn by warmists.

Surprised that Louise “cut n’ paste any old press release from Greenpeace/WWF” Gray regurgitated something this critical. Guess she didn’t even read it – just saw “peer review” and “wind farms” and assumed it was straightforward alarmist stuff.

>>
While ironic that something designed to reduce CO2 emissions (and presumably warming)is actually producing warming around it, this isn’t really any big surprise.
>>
Wind turbines are designed to produce renewable energy. That is their function and always has been. Anyone thinking they well reduce global CO2 is probably beyond help.

The fact that they cause localised warming is indeed not surprising. Just about any technique producing or consuming hundreds of MW of power will produce localised warming.

Coal plants give of huge amounts of steam from their cooling towers: huge installations designed to dump heat into the local atmosphere. Nuclear plant does the same thing into local water ways or coastal waters.

Both those effects are much larger than the warming caused by the turbulence of wind mills. Classical power generation is only about 35% efficient, the rest ending up as heat. For a 1GW nuclear plant that’s about 650MW of localise heating 24/7 .

So the article is correct, it’s no surprise that large scale power generation causes local warming. Why then is it worth an article?

If localised heating is supposed to be an “issue” maybe this would be a plus wind generators. If not, it’s a just a badly thought out bash at wind generation.

This story is being carried in some of the UK press (The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph).

I am sceptical about the study although it would not surprise me that at a local level, a windfarm could have some impact on its immediate environment. It is obviously altering the natural windflow. There have also been some reports suggesting that windfarms may be reducing the average wind speed.

Whether this local impact has any significant bearing on global levels is, of course, a very different matter.

We now know that windfarms do not to any significant degree reduce CO2 levels (if for no other reason that they require almost 100% back up with conventional power generation). They therefore fail at their primary aim. It would be a lovely irony if there is merit in this study and they actually add to global warming.

Hopefully, this study will add to the weight of evidence calling for a re-think on windfarms.

I’m no fan of these ugly, bird killing contraptions, but it seems that the warming is restricted to the surface. Since wind farms mix different layers of the atmosphere, as the lower ones absorb heat, the higher parts should get colder. So perhaps (I couldn’t read the paywalled paper) claiming that wind farms cause atmospheric warming is a bit misleading.

Surprisingly, Richard Black has (albeit with huge caveats) covered this at the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17871300 – next to a story about the Campaign for the Protestion of Rural England demanding further clarity and control over the march of inappropriately sized and located turbine farms across the countryside. Perhaps the tide is starting to turn against wind…

The ‘over wind farms’ has me a bit baffled. That indicates less turbulence, resulting in less air to surface heat transfer during the night. Whereas I’d expect wind turbines to increase turbulence as any obstruction would.

So they cause warming – great. They also confuse the hell out of birds, who fly into the blades and die – many of these are from endangered or at risk species … I’ve got to go to my fallback about ecomentalists – they just aren’t very environmentally friendly.

I wonder with regards to the UHI effect if high-rise buildings could lead to turbulences – and therefore too to the mixing of warmer air from higher up. This could be another contribution to the UHI.

Never thought of that issue before but now that you mention it — yes most certainly. In the last few decades there has been a specialty in urban design and architecture where they analyze the effect of tall building complexes on surface winds. There a many example of buildings magnifying surface winds by redirecting airflow as the prevailiing wind impacts the up wind side of the building. Sometimes those surface winds are strong enough to blow pedestrians off their feet.

The Dept of Reclamation building on the Denver Federal Center is one of those buildings where there is a large court yard under the open lowest story of the building. During our front range wind storms they close access to that area because the winds will literally pick people up and slam dunk them to the pavement.

When even High Priestess Louise Gray says wind “power” is warm, you can be sure it has lost its coolness. And since all modern religious “science” is solely about coolness and status, an uncool “power” source will be on the way out soon.

Without wind “power”, the Gaian repertoire of Healing Sacraments gets mighty short. The Solar Sacrament doesn’t work at all in Northern Europe; they haven’t even tried to defend that one.

Strong winds do not necessarily create turbulence at ground level ,Tallbloke.
I have flown light aircraft and gliders for over 50 years now so am very familiar with wind shear and the changes in wind velocities with height. And with low level wind shear which can and has embarrassed many a pilot while landing an aircraft.
My most memorable example of some really marked wind shear was late at night some 50 plus years ago when I was still of the “quite wet behind the ears” vintage.
It happened very late at night while I was sowing our winter wheat crop.
The area is dead flat for kilometres in all directions so it was ideal for wind shear.
There was almost no sound after the tractor was switched off during this very cold, late at night winter period and the air was almost completely still.
I climbed onto about a metre high platform on the seeder and stood up and to my amazement, damn near got blown off that platform with the strength of the wind.

With a little experimentation I found that the shear layer was perhaps no more than a foot thick and was about 2.5 metres above ground level which is why I did not detect it while on the ground or even when I was driving the open topped tractor. Not much in the way of comforts for farmers in those, thankfully, long gone days.
By ducking down to waist level while on the seeder’s platform, I found that I was in almost dead still air.
Stand up and from my chest level up was a howling gale but without the noise effects.
It was one of the most marked and amazing examples of wind shear at low levels I have ever come across and was completely undetectable at ground level in those wide open obstruction free spaces.

The paper is paywalled, so I, like I guess most here, haven’t read it. So some basic physics will have to do.

Wind turbines do not emit GHGs. They just convert wind kinetic energy to electrical, plus waste heat liberated at and downwind of the site. The electrical energy is destined to end up as heat too, but somewhere else.

But the kinetic energy of the wind was always going to be converted to heat somewhere, with or without turbines. It’s the only thing that can happen to it. The question is, where?

The wind farms create turbulence which turns KE into heat locally. But that isn’t heat added to the Earth. It’s just moving the location of heat production. More is produced near the wind farm; less wherever the wind was going.

P. Solar says:
April 30, 2012 at 1:38 am
“Wind turbines are designed to produce renewable energy. That is their function and always has been. Anyone thinking they well reduce global CO2 is probably beyond help.”

I disagree, their main function, for the time being, is pumping money. The energy is a byproduct.

“The fact that they cause localised warming is indeed not surprising. Just about any technique producing or consuming hundreds of MW of power will produce localised warming.”

Don’t be silly. You’d need about 2,000 2.5 MW Wind turbines to replace one single 1 GW coal or nuclear plant; assuming a capacity factor of 20 %; and then you’d still need the GW plant to accomodate for when the wind doesn’t blow.

“Coal plants give of huge amounts of steam from their cooling towers: huge installations designed to dump heat into the local atmosphere. Nuclear plant does the same thing into local water ways or coastal waters.”

Again, one plant against 2,000 wind turbines.

“Both those effects are much larger than the warming caused by the turbulence of wind mills. Classical power generation is only about 35% efficient, the rest ending up as heat. For a 1GW nuclear plant that’s about 650MW of localise heating 24/7 .”

That is one cooling tower against 2,000 big wind turbine wakes. Again, you’re trying to belittle the effect of wind turbines by not mentioning the number needed. 2,000 big wind turbine wakes cover a lot of area.

“So the article is correct, it’s no surprise that large scale power generation causes local warming. Why then is it worth an article?”

You have been trying to deceive with every sentence in your comment by making it sound like that’s one wind turbine vs. one power plant.

Now, I couldn’t care less about this negligible warming, it’s probably even good for plants and wildlife at least where I live, but we can and will use this warming effect to irritate warmists and make them blather self-contradictory stuff. After all, I’d like to see the subsidies gone.

Say you have a 500 Megawatt wind farm ( they do that size in Texas) and your generators are 90% efficient (including the gearing and orientation motors and all). That’s 10% of the energy turned into heat. 50 Megawatts. Think dumping 50 Megawatts into the air over a Texas farm will matter?

But it’s actually worse than that. That’s the electrical efficiency. The aerodynamic efficiency is less. The wind arrives with energy as velocity. That velocity is turned into motion of the wind turbine and into heat via turbulence. The theoretical max efficiency of a wind turbine is about 59%https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz'_law

So depending on how much kinetic energy in the wind is turned into thermal energy, you will get various quantities of heat produced. Call it 40%. Now we’re talking about 200 Megawatts of heat from our wind farm.

The actual numbers will be something else, but these numbers give some useful bounds on the problem. Somewhere between 50 and 200 Megawatts moved from linear kinetic energy to thermal energy (molecular kinetic energy) for our wind farm… Plus the layer mixing effects.

You just can’t ignore the laws of thermodynamics, and ANY energy conversion will involve waste heat dumped to the environment. The only question is the size of the numbers.

It is also the case that you can not ignore enthalpy and entropy. It isn’t just about temperatures.

BTW, something similar must happen with solar power. A dark solar panel (required to efficiently absorb sunlight) will have more total sunshine turned to heat and less reflected back to space. Net, it must warm the air near it. If you doubt that, realize that many solar panels have been made which run water through pipes attached to the cells. Both to cool the cells and heat the water… The typical absorption of average natural surfaces is 18% (which is why photographers use an 18% gray card to set exposure meters…). Say our dark solar cells raise this to 72% ( I think it will be more than that, but let’s be conservative). That’s 4 x 18%. So a 300% increase in solar absorption. At 1 kW / m^2, we had been 180 W and now we’re at 720 Watts of absorbed sunshine turned into heat.

Now imagine a 1000 Megawatt solar thermal plant. It’s increased the heat absorbed (and eventually rejected to the atmosphere) by 540 Megawatts. (720 – 180 original). But even the energy that gets turned into electrons eventually becomes heat at the end user location. Just no way around it. (Physics is like that…)

I guess it’s too much to ask that Greens learn some thermodynamics principles…

You can’t just hand wave away that heating with a ‘somewhere’. The “where” matters. IF that wind went up a hill, the heat gets lost to enthalpy changes, not temperature changes.

IF that wind passes over water, evaporation turns that heat into water vapor, not temperature.

IF that water vapor rises (as it does) to make rain, that heat can be dumped at altitude, perhaps even at the top of a thunderstorm in the lower stratosphere (as thunderclouds can do).

SO where and how both matter. As hail making in the lower stratospheric layers is far different heat liberation than hot air at ground level. One will show up in the Stevenson Screen down wind of the farm, the other as ice on the ground. I think that matters.

Heat flow is not temperature. These things are creating temperature rises at ground level out of that energy in the wind. That wind could have gone on to many other non-temperature-rise heat flows instead.

As “Global Warmists” want to ignore that fact and pretend that temperature at ground level is all that matters (and religiously ignore enthalpy – i.e. things like dew point and humidity changes) then meet your own petard and realize that it is only temperature rise at ground level that matters at that wind farm. Don’t like that? Then how about putting in some enthalpy calculations in your Global Average Temperatures and adding some vertical convective heat dumping into the lower stratosphere (as is seen every time there’s a thunderstorm or hurricane or cyclone or monsoon or….) and adjusting for air density changes and…

E.M.Smith says: April 30, 2012 at 3:48 am
“You just can’t ignore the laws of thermodynamics, and ANY energy conversion will involve waste heat dumped to the environment. The only question is the size of the numbers.”

Yes, so let’s look. The wind calc is spurious, because what you’re not allowing for is what would have happened if the wind farm had not dissipated that heat. All wind energy ends up as heat somewhere. Wind farms just move the location.

But the other thing is that the direct use of energy by humans is very small compared to GHG forcing. Total energy use is about 15000 GW. That’s about 0.03 W/m2 of the Earth’s surface. The waste energy that you are talking about would be of the same order, if the energy generation was all renewable. But GHG forcing is about two orders of magnitude greater.

Did anybody here read the paper! Roughly 50 times the word spatial is used. This is a highly local event possibly caused by increase surface roughness and air mixing by turbine blades as state in the article.
Nowhere in the article the authors make the suggestion that this would have any effect on global temperatures. It is probably a nice effect if you have a vinyard downwind so you do not have to fear the night time frosts that much. In some contries you have to pay helicopters to do excatly this job, yet you would not ague that this would cause global warming.

E.M.Smith says: April 30, 2012 at 4:04 am
“You can’t just hand wave away that heating with a ‘somewhere’. The “where” matters. IF that wind went up a hill, the heat gets lost to enthalpy changes, not temperature changes.”

No, none of the things you listed are permanent energy storages. If air goes up a hill, the atmosphere doesn’t rise; other air is displaced down. If water evaporates, it will later condense. If PV work is done, it will be undone. It all has to end up as heat. Somewhere.

But, as I said later, the amounts are all small compared with GHG forcing. No “warmists” worry about the direct production of heat by human activity, on a global scale. It’s tiny compared with GHG. And the same is true of the associated waste heat.

“Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built.”
T. Boone Pickens’ oily handprints are all over this one.

Wind farms remove energy from the air, slowing it down, and between the slower air and the warming by mixing, evaporation is going to increase, increasing water needs for crops and creating the permanent drought that they so excitedly predict.

When the disasters from global warming-that-isn’t fail to appear, never fear. Green energy will make it happens anyhow!

Any climate effect that is not related specifically to the products of burning fossil fuels can be safely ignored, rationalized or overlooked.
The flow of taxpayer funds into the pockets of the crony bureaucrats, politicians and financial interests who perpetuate these scams is especially to be overlooked and never considered when it is time to vote.

Actually I think the biggest atmospheric temperature effect is not waste heat from the turbines. It’s more likely there is a huge effect in the way the surface gets rid of KE. Texas is dry! The surface has trouble shedding energy by conduction down through the dry soil. It also has trouble conducting to the atmosphere in calm conditions since (calm) air is a wonderful insulator.

During the day the surface gets very hot from incoming shortwave and the best way for it to equilibrate in calm conditions is radiataing long wave. If you create a lot of turbulence in the boundary layer you change the proportion of energy lost from strongly radiated (and lost to the lower atmosphere) to strongly conductive to the lower atmosphere.

At night the same turbulence increases the amount of energy that can be transferred by conduction from the surface to the lower atmosphere. Instead of a weak surface boundary mixing you get mixing all the way up to the height of the blades and beyond, several hundred feet.

I climbed onto about a metre high platform on the seeder and stood up and to my amazement, damn near got blown off that platform with the strength of the wind.

A lot of people decry anecdotal evidence, but I’ve found that good anecdotal evidence can lead to Aha! moments or at least further understanding of a phenomenon at hand (or expose the fact that there’s a phenomenon at hand). This is a great story, I’ll be repeating it!

There was almost no sound after the tractor was switched off during this very cold, late at night winter period and the air was almost completely still. …

Stand up and from my chest level up was a howling gale but without the noise effects.

You didn’t say what the stars looked like, I will assume “glorious.”

Clearly, you found the height of the air inversion. Radiational cooling chilled the ground, that chilled the air which chilled air right above it, and eventually you should have had a thin layer of cold ground air next to air that hadn’t cooled down or had enough mixing to stay warm.

I’m sure the windchill factor swamped things, but when you were in the howling gale level, could you tell the air was warmer?

The essay ends with a plea to discard nighttime temperatures as a means to track heat accumulation in the atmosphere from greenhouse gases or other positive radiative forcing.

There’s a bit of a dilemma here, and exposed in the main focus of the new article. Nighttime ground level temperatures are vitally important to ground level life (like to all the New England gardens that may have suffered a freeze last night). However, they’re utterly useless to measure the heat content of the atmosphere. However^2, radiational cooling is still important as a measure of how much CO2 is retarding nighttime radiation. However^3, water vapor confounds those measurements.

Suffice it to say, as long as it still gets frigging cold at night in the high, dry deserts of the world, things aren’t as bad as some people make it out to be.

“A recent study, co-authored by Fraser Institute energy economist Gerry Angevine, found that Ontario residents will pay an average of $285-million more for electricity each year for the next 20 years as a result of subsidies to renewable energy companies. ”

BTW, something similar must happen with solar power. A dark solar panel (required to efficiently absorb sunlight) will have more total sunshine turned to heat and less reflected back to space. … The typical absorption of average natural surfaces is 18% (which is why photographers use an 18% gray card to set exposure meters…). Say our dark solar cells raise this to 72% ( I think it will be more than that, but let’s be conservative). That’s 4 x 18%. So a 300% increase in solar absorption. At 1 kW / m^2, we had been 180 W and now we’re at 720 Watts of absorbed sunshine turned into heat.

It’s the typical reflectance, err, albedo, that’s 18%. Even new snow manages to absorb some 10% of sunlight. I could see dark solar panels reflecting about a third of the light of average terrain, absorbing an extra 12%, so only and extra 120 watts.

During the daytime, any extra convection will help limit the increase in the high temperature, but I bet there are interesting nighttime effects with really great radiators positioned a few meters above the ground.

All the wind farms are warming the earth; that we know.
Electricity gained? There is not much to show.
The green power decree
Heats the earth one degree.
Its Quixotic pursuit has now reached a new low.

“Recognising that this could wrongly be interpreted as suggesting the local temperature will continue to rise, lead researcher Liming Zhou cautioned: “The estimated warming trend only applies to the study region and to the study period, and thus should not be extrapolated linearly into other regions or over longer periods.”

and

“At night, air above ground level tends to be warmer than the ground. Dr Zhou and his colleagues believe the turbine blades are simply stirring up the air, mixing warm and cold, and bringing some of the warmth down to ground level.

“The result in the paper looks pretty solid to me,” commented Prof Steven Sherwood from the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

“Daytime temperatures do not appear to be affected. This makes sense, (and) this same strategy is commonly used by fruit growers who fly helicopters over their orchards to combat early morning frosts.”

Hoho
This paper refers to local land temperature change not global climate change. Come on now, you guys are smarter than that!

The law of conservation of energy would be the place to start thinking about this stuff. Heat on earth comes from the sun. The heat generated by burning fossil fuels (let alone heat stirred up by wind farms) is insignificant compared to solar heating and the heat trapping effect of GHGs. This is very basic stuff.

I wonder with regards to the UHI effect if high-rise buildings could lead to turbulences – and therefore too to the mixing of warmer air from higher up. This could be another contribution to the UHI.

That’s a good point, I don’t know the answer. (Which means I shouldn’t be wasting everyone’s time with a reply!)

UHI effects are generally blamed on heat storage in bricks, concrete, and pavement being released at night. That by itself may be enough to delay or prevent the formation of an inversion. However, it sometimes doesn’t take a very tall building to be above the rural inversion level, so I think you have a very good point.

While there are places with very thin inversions (e.g. ROM’s great story from running a seeder late at night), large valleys can make for inversions deep enough to cover tall buildings.

The morning I left Carnegie-Mellon University and Pittsburgh PA in August 1974, I drove east on the Penn-Lincoln “Parkway” and climbed out of valley, I took a last look at Pittsburgh in my rear-view mirror. It was about 1000, and the inversion was just breaking up, made visible by the brown cloud lifting above the city.

I missed CMU and its ARPAnet access, I didn’t miss Pittsburgh’s steel mills and coke plants.

Nick Stokes and EM Smith,
Aren’t you failing to distinguish between heat and energy? I can’t remember enough about quantisation of energy within and between atoms, but I’m sure Boltzmann has something to say about it. Since friction with air absolutely generates heat, and turbulence creates eddies and vortices which will increase the residence time of the air in that area, I could see a wind-farm could potentially result in the release of energy (heat) in the vicinity of the farm that would have been released or transferred in other forms of energy transfer (not necessarily heat) elsewhere had the wind farm not been there. How much and whether it’s significant (compared to stirring up 30m of air depth) I know not.

Unlikely. I think this relies on their being a temperature inversion, which is almost always at night. And in light winds, too, come to think of it.

While Wayne may not have worded things quite right, exactly how is the air inversion broken up without turbulence? Clearly, ground heating is out, as is vacuuming out the inversion. Seems to me turbulence to break up or prevent the boundary layer and the laminar flow above it is close enough. Once you replace cold, still ground level air with warmer nighttime wind, you’re going to mess up dew formation and allow nighttime evaporation.

Mr. Connolly, I didn’t miss it. We have motor-driven wind turbines in orchards along Hwy 11 for the purpose of mixing warmer air with cold frost-producing air in order to keep fragile fruit from frost damage. No farmer I know would extrapolate that practice to say that “the climate is affected” because of it. They are fully aware of the local mixing affect. In these parts, that’s a “duh” piece of information.

My complaint centers on the money used to produce this already known “revelation”. I’ve a better way to spend research money. Just ask a farmer.

Ah, according to Richard Black’s story for the BBC it is all OK as the warming only happens at night! What next? Maybe they will find that onshore the vibrations are setting off earth tremors, or offshore confusing marine wildlife!
Wind farms might be good at reducing overall fuel consumption but they are by no means fuel replacements, still got to have something for when the wind, either doesn’t blow or blows too hard….

@wmconnolley quoting approvingly Zhou: “The estimated warming trend only applies to the study region and to the study period, and thus should not be extrapolated linearly into other regions or over longer periods.”

This is your version of science? Then go tell all the model makers they are out of business because observations must not be extrapolated to the world at large. Every study that estimated empty grid cells from neighboring cells is fatally flawed.

If the sun rose in the east this morning and every morning in your living memory, don’t count on it happening tomorrow because you’d be committing the sin of extrapolation.

> Ric Werme says: wmconnolley says: No, its caused by mixed down air from higher up. wayne says:… They create turbulence breaking the smooth surface skin laminar flow which increases soil evaporation
> While Wayne may not have worded things quite right, exactly how is the air inversion broken up without turbulence?

Wayne is wrong to think that evaporation is a significant part of the effect. The effect is the turbines mix down warmer air from above, on nights with an inversion (principally or entirely; I can’t see the paper either, so I’m not quite sure exactly what their results say).

There is no energy conversion from kinetic to heat, or whatever (or at least, it isn’t significant). All that is happening is mixing. So, in particular, the total atmospheric heat isn’t changed. So its only a local effect.

Do you think it is at all interesting that not one of the “skeptics” here had the slightest idea what the effect was? Or were even capable of reading what Black had, pretty clearly, written?

REPLY: Hey Connolley, read the first paragraph before you say “not one”. I’m really growing weary of your condescension. Since you think we are all “stupid”, as you stated publicly, why not go back to your Stoat blog and rant there. I don’t disagree with your explanation, but saying “not one of the “skeptics” here had the slightest idea what the effect was” is a condescending assumption on your part, and is dead wrong. – Anthony

wmconnolley says:
April 30, 2012 at 6:06 am
“Daytime temperatures do not appear to be affected.

This is also true of global warming, where most of the change in the past 150 years has occurred over land, to night-time temperatures. The obvious conclusion is that warming is a result of increased mixing of the atmosphere due to land use changes.

150 years ago humans were using 4% of the surface of the earth. We are now using 40%. Largely made possible by the switch from animal energy to fossil energy. It is this change in land use that is changing the temperature, not changes in CO2.

CO2 is well mixed, and we would see changes in both daytime and nighttime temperatures. As well we would see temperature changes in the atmosphere first, leading the changes in surface temperatures. What has been clear from the satellites and from weather balloons for some time is that the atmosphere is not heating as fast as the surface. Thus, CO2 cannot be the cause.

There is no mechanism that allows increased CO2 to warm the surface faster than the atmosphere. There is no mechanism that allows CO2 to warm the night faster than the day. The CO2 theory of AGW cannot explain these effects, which are the principle components of the observed global warming over the past 150 years.

This sounds just a bit crazy to me. There is no net warming going on here. This is all energy that is already here and is only being moved around – there is mixing but no new energy is introduced. The volumetric energy level doesn’t change. The same thing happens when nature builds a mountain. The energy from the cool air warms the upper air and finally the dark night sky beyond Earth. Some of that lost energy is returned to the lower atmosphere on its way out, but out it goes.

I’m skeptical. It also seems I’m in agreement with Connolley which I find offensive but that’s science for you.

“At its maximum extent on March 18, Arctic sea ice extent was within two standard deviations of the average, a measure that scientists look at as an estimate of the natural range of variability for the data.”http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

“Overall, the warming effect reported in this study is local and is small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature changes. Very likely, the wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the air’s heat near the surface, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases”.

taken from a Q&A with the paper’s authors. Incidentally, the Fox News coverage of this is fantastic. [/sarc]

AHHA!!!
This explains how the Texas Rangers are 16-6….. warmer temps from wind turbines (Texas having the largest!!) resulting in more home runs…. We have correlation, and finally causation.
(For our foreign friends, the Rangers are an American baseball team, and George Bush Jr had a 1% interest in the team from 1989 to 1994……. I’m sure someone will figure out how to blame Bush for the warming)

So added turbulence is bringing atmospheric heat from above down to the
surface, and increasing surface temperature on clear nights. This increases
outgoing radiation, and therefore cooling of the atmosphere.

At this rate, more wind farms could slightly *decrease* peak daytime
temperatures when there are clear nights with wind.

wmconnolley says:
April 30, 2012 at 6:06 am
“The estimated warming trend only applies to the study region and to the study period, and thus should not be extrapolated linearly into other regions or over longer periods.”
=========
Ah, the hockey stick school of statistical analysis as presented by the IPCC. Take a limited number of trees that grow in limited areas and limited elevations, and use this to extrapolate global temperatures for the next 100 years.

97% of the climate scientists in the world signed on to this. They said it was valid statistics. Proper science. Now we are hearing that you can’t do this, that you can’t extrapolate to other regions or longer periods of time???

Preposterous, the IPCC has already set the ground rules for science. These rules have been accepted by 97% of all climate scientists. If one small sample over a limited time period is valid to extrapolate over the entire globe a century into the future, then all samples are valid.

The evidence is clear. Windmills are heating the surface at 0.72C per decade. This is 10 times the observed rate of global warming attributed to CO2. 10 Times!! And windmills are increasing much, much faster than CO2. Hundreds, even thousands of times faster than CO2.

Yes, and Balck has got it right: the key bit you’ve all missed is “The scientists believe the effect is caused by turbines bringing relatively warm air down to ground level.”
==========================================================
Nobody missed it. “Believe” suggests to me that it’s a theory developed to explain the observations which will need to be further investigated. Nice to see a theory being developed to explain the data rather than the other way round.
One question, though. The claim is that there is a temperature differential between the ground and air at night but not in the day. I was under the (obviously) mistaken impression that during the day, the ground was warmer and then radiated the extra heat back to the air at night. In that case, I’d have thought that the same mechanics would lead to turbines “bringing the relatively cool air down to ground level” during the day and commensurately reducing daytime ground temperature?

REPLY: This is just another case of the “Connolley is superior and we are all stupid” mindset he holds. Apparently he missed my introduction about frost mitigation when he lumped me and everyone into “you’ve all missed it”. What a plonker of a comment. – Anthony

Reminds me of a method used in the Arabia desert at one time to create ice. A barrier is erected and water placed in shallow trays behind it. As the prevailing wind flows over the barrier it increases the cooling effect on the leeward side, allowing ice to be formed where it would otherwise not be possible.

“Usually at night the air closer to the ground becomes colder when the sun goes down and the earth cools. But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature”

And why does the air closer to the ground become colder, but that it radiates to the 3 K of outer space, while air above it doesn’t lose heat energy via radiation in the wavelengths of the ‘atmospheric window’ like the ‘black body’ of the ground surface? There isn’t any overall warming, actually cooling, from more radiative heat loss from the warmer ground, just an increase in surface temps.

“Overall, the warming effect reported in this study is local and is small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature changes. *** Very likely, the wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the air’s heat near the surface ***, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases”.

I’ll go with the farmers any day – they know the effect better than anyone here and have used this method of frost prevention to save their produce by common practice. That’s a local effect. In regard to the temperatures itself – it appears our methods of temperature record keeping merely measures where gages are at any given moment in time at what altitude. I can tell you the temperature next to my house but I have no idea what that temperature is 10 or 20 or 200 meters above my house. Exactly who does at all points over the earth? I believe if my memory serves me correctly – Anthony you did a very nice study on the local Reno ( I think that was you) area and its UHI effect for that local area awhile back that would be similar to the local area covered by windmills here. Would this effect then be somewhat similar?

Weather channel has a reality show called “Turbine Cowboys” about the brave workers who install and maintain these bird grinders. In one segment, we see men risking their lives to replace huge turbines destroyed by high winds, just so a few rich homeowners on a island can say they use renewal energy. Has anyone ever accurately calculated how much energy is used to produce, maintain, and repair these colossal machines?

As an amusing side note, observe that warming the nighttime surface actually causes more rapid net cooling of the Earth viewed as a system. The warmer the ground temperatures are at night, the more they radiate. The more they are re-warmed by recirculated air the more net energy they radiate away over the course of the night (because recall that the air itself almost doesn’t radiate at all — nearly transparent in the broad band of BB radiation centroid to its temperature). The cooler, then, the air itself at the end of the night.

Since this doesn’t affect the rate that energy is absorbed the following day, the overall effect is net cooling.

I am a bit dubious, though. Wind turbines don’t turn unless there is enough wind to turn them. They then have to significantly increase the downstream turbulence in order to produce enough mixing to significantly warm the ground, especially when there is generally a thermal lapse rate that goes the other way, with the air overhead being cooler, not warmer, than the air on the ground (although yes, this could at some point invert over the course of an evening — but does the inversion occur that regularly?). In general it sounds like the sort of thing that can happen only when the conditions are just right — dry near-desert air so that ground-air temperatures generally do invert, a smooth, flat plain with gentle vertically structured laminar flow breezes with little ground structure to create turbulence. Too strong a breeze or just a few trees and you get mixing and turbulence anyway, too much humidity and you don’t get the inversion, and so on. Texas, perhaps, NC I very much doubt it (too humid, little inversion, lots of turbulence anyway, at least near the coast or on mountain slopes where there is likely to be a sustained wind).

Either way, though — warmer ground due to mixing equals a cooler Earth overall. In fact, one can compute the additional radiative loss associated with 1 degree K of sustained differential surface heating and see just how much cooler the Earth as a whole will be. Oh, and we get a bit more differential cooling by turning some of the energy of the wind into electricity and then turning the electricity into LOCALIZED heat — the more hot spots we have, the more efficient the cooling. Thermally homogeneous air and ground cools the slowest.

Ric Werme says:
April 30, 2012 at 5:44 am
…
It’s the typical reflectance, err, albedo, that’s 18%. Even new snow manages to absorb some 10% of sunlight. I could see dark solar panels reflecting about a third of the light of average terrain, absorbing an extra 12%, so only and extra 120 watts.

Just a thought here … I really think this ought to be balanced (that is, measured or contrasted with or) against a ‘natural’ environment background of ‘greenery’ i.e. plants, grass, trees etc. which a) absorb some impinging sunlight energy and also b) provides evaporative cooling to maintain a lowered ‘plant’ (vegetative) temperature …

Imagine if thermometers were placed at expanding wind farms over the years. When some would have noticed there seemed to be an unusual warming trend compared to “rural” areas without them, we’d be told it was thoroughly investigated by statistical analysis or wind patterns and found to be negligible with no effect on “global” trends.

Seems to me this effect could be studied by looking at aerial or satellite photos of windfarm installations, and adjacent land not so disturbed, and looking for visible differences in the extent of frost and/or snow during the freeze-up and break-up periods in Fall and Spring. If a windfarm causes local warming, one might expect a visible frost-free wake down-wind of the turbines on a night when it was just cold enough to cause frost in the surrounding countryside.

So added turbulence is bringing atmospheric heat from above down to the
surface, and increasing surface temperature on clear nights. This increases
outgoing radiation, and therefore cooling of the atmosphere.

And why does the air closer to the ground become colder, but that it radiates to the 3 K of outer space, while air above it doesn’t lose heat energy via radiation in the wavelengths of the ‘atmospheric window’ like the ‘black body’ of the ground surface? There isn’t any overall warming, actually cooling, from more radiative heat loss from the warmer ground, just an increase in surface temps.

This study is actually quite instructive about the heat flow mechanic going on. The headline should be changed to: Wind Farms can cause warming of ground and ground based thermometers while silmultaneously cooling the atmosphere. The thermometers are leading us astray again. Is this a Rural Heat Island effect?

I haven’t read through all of the comments so this might have already been stated. I’m not sure that this is all so important, as the amount of heat is unchanged, i.e. calories. All that it speaks to is that the heat is moved to somewhere that it wasn’t previously at a certain point in time. But does it affect weather all that much? Personally, I doubt it as the heat and cold don’t seem to be displaced very much. Methinks a LOT more research is going to be needed. It should be interesting to await such research though.

> Ric Werme says: wmconnolley says: No, its caused by mixed down air from higher up. wayne says:… They create turbulence breaking the smooth surface skin laminar flow which increases soil evaporation
> While Wayne may not have worded things quite right, exactly how is the air inversion broken up without turbulence?

Wayne is wrong to think that evaporation is a significant part of the effect. The effect is the turbines mix down warmer air from above, on nights with an inversion (principally or entirely; I can’t see the paper either, so I’m not quite sure exactly what their results say).

I think Wayne is one step ahead of you and is looking at the implications of “the effect.” If the effect is that the inversion doesn’t breaks down or doesn’t form, the paper says one result is that the low temperature goes up. I don’t think you have any complaint with that. Wayne is saying that ground moisture will be lost too. I don’t have any complaint with that.

> While Wayne may not have worded things quite right, exactly how is the air inversion broken up without turbulence?

Wayne is wrong to think that evaporation is a significant part of the effect. The effect is the turbines mix down warmer air from above, on nights with an inversion (principally or entirely; I can’t see the paper either, so I’m not quite sure exactly what their results say).

William, I don’t think I am wrong, it is you instead. There is no warmer upper air on the average, there is such a thing called a lapse rate that guarantees, averaged, that the higher you go the colder it gets, day or night, averaged. You need to spend some time studying what is called radiosondes. During the winter and early spring you will see these inversions, when a warm mass of air moves into a frigid area but they are rather rare, when the temperature of upper air is actually warmer than that near the ground. That must be what you are envisioning.

On the long term if the windmills were mixing the air vertically, which it does, but is not this effect the paper is speaking of, the temperatures would be lower consistently near the surface, not warmer, a additional cooling. To be on the average warmer near the ground you need additional energy near the ground, and, mixing the cooler upper air is not the answer, it is dry conditions. And how does the area about wind farms get dry and therefore warmer at night? There is less evapo-transpiration of surface water, the main cooling process. Without the moisture the soil at the surface gets much higher in the day exaggerating this problem even more and more energy is pushed down by convection into the top soil to release during the nighttime.

No, William, I think you are thinking wrong and if the paper is blaming it on the cooler upper air mixing lower, they are wrong too. That is what I think, also never reading the complete paper, but nine of ten peer-reviewed papers are also wrong to some degree so nothing is new.

And I’m like Anthony, you need to climb off that high-horse you seem to keep yourself propped upon. I won’t throw insults at you if you don’t throw them at others.

Once again, it is the moisture we are screwing up with the wind farms and nothing good is going to come from them. When farms with windmills are proven to be where the bumper-crops are being produced without massive additional irrigation I will change my tune, I have always been a scientist, letters or not.

William, as you read the above, please change “pushed down by convection” to conduction. Caught that on my first glance after hitting “Post Comment”. Sometimes my fingers are typing in front of my thoughts! ;-)

Nick Stokes;
No, none of the things you listed are permanent energy storages.>>>>

The exact same is true of CO2 Nick.

But you are missing the point. Wind IS a cooling process. What do you think causes wind in the first place? Daily heating/cooling due to the diurnal cycle causes expansion/contraction of the air mass which in turn flows from high pressure to low pressure. Interrupt the wind and you interrupt the cooling process.

Got me thinking about forests(tall trees causing wind turbulence),rocky outcropings,cliffs,large boulders(heat islands ?).Does all that remove heat from the atmosphere?to the surface?WUWT?
Thanks for all the interesting articles and comments

Well, I’ll have to take a closer look at that page, but I do take Wikipedia pages on climate with a large grain of salt. There are a number of things worth arguing about, e.g. the first sentence:

There are several causes of an urban heat island (UHI). The principal reason for the nighttime warming is that buildings block surface heat from radiating into the relatively cold night sky.

While that might be “principal” in an urban canyon, several reports at WUWT have documented UHI effects in surprisingly small towns. It also talks about “concrete and asphalt” but not bricks. If you get a chance, please go through that section a line at a time and explain what I’m missing. Then we’ll return the favor with less urban settings with measurable UHI.

Even the time I spent in Pittsburgh wasn’t a pure urban environment. Instead of an urban canyon, CMU is located next to Schenley Park. I remember walking from the campus to Oakland for a midnight meal an feeling the cool, moist air flowing down the hill from the park while feeling the warmth radiating from the bricks and concrete of the buildings on the other side of Panther Hollow. Perhaps heat from asphalt to due to buildings scattering the heat radiated from that Wiki item. That should count as “blocked surface heat.”

” scale of nighttime warming, large enough to be visible on MODIS satellite imagery thanks to large scale wind farms.”

Dr. No would be proud of them!
Gore, Hansen, Mann, (et al) knowing man-made CO2 was not going to result in Global Warming as scammed; those fiends came up with an alternative, pro Gaia looking, scheme to raise earth’s temperatures.

wayne says: > William, I don’t think I am wrong, it is you instead. There is no warmer upper air on the average, there is such a thing called a lapse rate that guarantees, averaged, that the higher you go the colder it gets, day or night, averaged.

Sigh. Yes, I know that. What you’ve failed to realise (perhaps excusably, if all you’re relying on is this post) is that the effect isn’t constant. It only occurs under particular conditions. You could do worse than read Black of the Beeb who says “At night, air above ground level tends to be warmer than the ground. Dr Zhou and his colleagues believe the turbine blades are simply stirring up the air, mixing warm and cold, and bringing some of the warmth down to ground level.”. Or, indeed, you could actually read what I’ve already said higher up, cos I’ve said this already.

So yes: on average, temperature decreases with height (well, nearly everywhere: it isn’t true over Antarctica in winter, or indeed on annual average). But it doesn’t always, which is why, errm, there is this thing called an inversion. But you’re wrong about the guarantee, as Antarctica proves.

I only believe when I see who is representing the source of the investigation.. If this is presented by some that are “backed” by big oil I will more likely than not call shenanigans. Because it is like allowing monsanto to do their own investigation on whether their food is “good” or bad.

> Ric Werme says: … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island#Causes … e.g. the first sentence: “There are several causes of an urban heat island (UHI). The principal reason for the nighttime warming is that buildings block surface heat from radiating into the relatively cold night sky.” While that might be “principal” in an urban canyon, several reports at WUWT have documented UHI effects in surprisingly small towns.

Well, the wiki page comes with references, so potentially you can read those and verify its correct. If you want to discuss it, the obvious place to do so is on the wiki talk page (don’t worry, contrary to what some here might think, the place is not infested with demons and it is safe to visit; you can always leave). If you’ve got evidence to back up your “UHI effects are generally blamed on heat storage in bricks, concrete, and pavement being released at night” you could present it.

You moved the italicized part down, noting it “deserves its own para in lede” but you left alone the last sentence:

Recent qualitative speculations indicate that urban thermal plumes may contribute to variation in wind patterns that may influence the melting of arctic ice packs and thereby the cycle of ocean current.

Fortunately someone else deleted it later, noting “Unqualified self-published crank, not available or reviewed anywhere, no information found about publisher either.” I’m disappointed you missed that one. Heck, it would have been a smaller edit – just remove that and put in a paragraph break. I wonder what effect wind turbines in Great Britain have on North Sea storms.

Indeed, you didn’t formally ask a question at all. But I think the question you meant to ask was: “WMC, so you made the article better, unlike RW who has never helped at all; but why didn’t you make it perfect?” Which is self-answering really.

REPLY: And the answer is… after the black marks you’ve given Wikipedia for your arrogant behavior there, many people don’t want to participate any more due to the bullying that you and a few others display there on the climate issue. The fact is that with many (but not all) climate articles, there aren’t stable references from one day to the next because there is so much tinkering going on. I think I speak for many in saying that we’d feel the climate articles would be more trustworthy if you weren’t involved. -Anthony

REPLY: I’ve never contributed? Really, you should learn to research before making such challenges. I submitted the original page on the Climate Reference Network to Wikipedia in April 2008 after my invited visit to NCDC. I actually did it from my hotel room in Asheville because no page existed on it and I thought there should be one after meeting with NCDC staff (who I was impressed with BTW for that project division). So I took the description from NCDC and posted it along with the appropriate title and cites. It was then promptly deleted by one of the pseudonym named climate bullies you cavort with. My crime was using my own name….because well, we just can’t have that awful Watts person submitting to Wikipedia. Only the anointed get to touch the holy Wiki climate reference book it seems, mere unclean mortals like myself get their contributions deleted wholesale. So I don’t bother anymore. I know others that have been turned off by the bullying as well.

Ah, the famous WMC signature line “You’re making that up.”, now used on almost any blog entry where you are challenged. Just look at any talk page and note the change history for articles on climate for Wikipedia and it is easy to see how much change goes on from day to day. There’s a lot of tinkering. Though from your world view it seems you don’t believe so. A few examples of what the climate bullies of Wikipedia have had happen to them:

Of course since you’ve never taken any responsibility for your behavior, I doubt you’ll do so now. You’ll just act like Mike Mann does and say its everyone else’s problem but yours.

Look, we don’t like each other, and I doubt we ever will. You think I’m stupid (along with everyone else here) and have said so publicly, I think you are a condescending bully. By that premise, why would we bother to even try anymore at Wikipedia (to make it better – your words) when you claim we are too stupid to contribute anything? So let’s make it simple, let’s not waste each other’s time here anymore. You have Stoat, I have WUWT. Your comments really aren’t welcome here because you’ve been so disruptive that the threads become mostly about you, rather than the topic. So, I suggest you stick to Stoat, because you aren’t winning any converts here with your style. – Anthony

I think there is way more going on here than simple mixing from above. Think about a surface model….

It’s a boundary layer connected to a (virtually, for a daily cycle) constant energy supply, a few meters below it, by soil with a highly variable, moisture dependent conductivity. Above, it is connected to the atmosphere by an insulator that has an R value highly dependent on turbulent flow at the surface.

During the day it is bombarded by short wave that it can either shed by conduction down (highly variable), conduction up (highly variable), or radiation ( temperature dependent).

The amount of turbulence in the boundary layer determines just how much incoming energy is available to radiate up or conduct down during the day. At night the turbulence determines how much stored soil energy can be extracted to replenish what is being lost by radiation.

No; those are just other examples of you making stuff up. Your claim was “The fact is that with many (but not all) climate articles, there aren’t stable references from one day to the next because there is so much tinkering going on”. You’ve provided no evidence for that (the CRN page obviously isn’t an example, its been stable for years, and you’ve provided no others). So, how about you find me a single wiki climate article that is, currently, badly unstable; or has been massively tinkered with “one day to the next” recently.

> Look, we don’t like each other, and I doubt we ever will. You think I’m stupid (along with everyone else here)

No, not really. “Unthinking” would be closer.

> So let’s make it simple, let’s not waste each other’s time here anymore. You have Stoat, I have WUWT. Your comments really aren’t welcome here…

I’m not here to be liked. I’m here to help educate your people who (from the comments in this thread, I think you cannot but agree) are in need of help. so if you’re formally banning me, you need to actually say so (but then you can forget all about the “no censorship” claims).

REPLY: And there you go, making stuff up. Do you see “formally banning” (your words) anywhere? How about a citation? I suggest that your presence here is a huge waste of everyone’s time, because due to your baggage, and your particular style of condescension, you are not well received. Further, you can’t even fess up to your own posts on Stoat, much less your failings on Wikipedia where you were in fact demoted.. You write a Stoat post about how stupid we are, citing Policy Lass and now to save face it’s “unthinking”. Mr. Connolley, your actions here (and elsewhere) personify the main reason climate science is failing in its message, and therefore I suggest your time is wasted. Though if you want to continue to waste time, be my guest. However, as before, you’ll get an extra level of moderation.

P.S.Linking to other web pages in your name – deleted. Choose Stoat for your name link, or leave it blank, you are not Grumbine.
P.P.S. For a real eye opener, see this Wikipedia page about Connolley and what they think about him and what actions have been taken

Re: A. Watts mod reply to wmconnolley @4/30 1:07 pm
This deserves to be elevated to a root post.

One of the things I have complimented Wikipedia on is the history page. You can see who said what when. Who deleted what. But that only works when the root page continues to exist. Your description of what happened to the “Climate Reference Network” page illustrates the Achilles’ Heel of Wikipedia — delete the root page and all edit history shenanigans disappears with it. It is the tree that falls in the forest that no one hears, so it never existed.

Ric said “are generally blamed on” which the wiki you pointed to states: “The principal reason for the nighttime warming is that buildings block surface heat from radiating into the relatively cold night sky.”

So I ran Louise Gray’s article through the Churnalism engine now that I finally have the press release to compare it with (I spent a fair bit of time trying to find it as soon as I saw Gray’s article to no avail. Was she emailed a copy of it before the embargo time and decided to report on it regardless beforehand?).

Her article pops up straight away. However the churnalism engine detects less churn than there actually appears to be when one eyeballs the article. I found one reason why – it compares the two in 15-character chunks. There are places where she has done something even worse than a straight cut and paste – if you compare the two you can see where she has falsely attributed quotes to people, simply using text from the press release and slapping quotes around it. It’s utterly appalling journalism:

wmconnolley says – “I’m here to help educate your people who (from the comments in this thread, I think you cannot but agree) are in need of help.”

Spoken like a true condescending Global Warmer. Yes, we should all listen to you experts on Global Warming, without question, cause you done so well thus far with your dire predictions. No doubt, Global Warming experts all have our best interests at heart, and in no way have benefited financially, career wise, or politically from jumping on the Global Warming bandwagon. Without question, Global Warming experts’ intentions are purely honorable, and they would never do anything unethical, like Hide the Decline or fraudulent, like Gleicked it.

No, you’ve completely misunderstood Potter. At least, you’ve misunderstood what I meant by it. UHI isn’t (wasn’t) my speciality. The point is that in the open, the ground can “see” the sky, and IR from the ground gets a clear path to leave (ignoring atmospheric path lengths for the moment, because that will only confuse). In an urban canyon, the ground can only “see” a thin strip of sky; most of the rest is building. So the IR is absorbed by the building, and then the arguement applies again. Not completely, and eventually the heat can make its way out. But it has very little to do with the heat stored in the building.

You might try asking that nice RP Sr; he knows more about this than I do. Except he doesn’t allow comments on his blog, so you can’t.

Dear oh dear.
You know better than to breath life into this crap anthony, did you actually read the paper?
Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of meteorology would immediately acknowledge that the temperature rise is almost certainly a result of disturbing the nightime boundary layer and fumigation ground layer.
proof yet again of ignoring facts, and drawing absolutely crazy conclusions.
Maybe you should look at the laws of thermodynamics and explain to us where you think the energy comes from to create the observed temperature rise, because for a fact there is no increase in energy resulting that could do it. maybe it’s zero point energy?

So let’s see what I learned so far… the problem is that the IWTs create mixing where it wasn’t happening before and thus the temperatures at the ground will go up due to upper warmer air being brought closer to ground level. And this will cause a loss of soil moisture. Hmmm… so how about the electricity generated by the IWTs being used to run some pumps to irrigate the land. What.. you say that it will take all the electricity from the IWTs just to run the pumps? Ohhhhh…..

wmconnolley;
The point is that in the open, the ground can “see” the sky, and IR from the ground gets a clear path to leave (ignoring atmospheric path lengths for the moment, because that will only confuse). In an urban canyon, the ground can only “see” a thin strip of sky; most of the rest is building. So the IR is absorbed by the building, and then the arguement applies again.>>>

Oh my. You said it wasn’t your area of expertise, and wow, is that evident. Let me walk you through it.

Suppose you have a lot that is 1000 square meters. You build a building upon it that covers exactly half the lot. What is the surface area that can “see” the sky?

rgbatduke says:
April 30, 2012 at 9:54 am
As an amusing side note, observe that warming the nighttime surface actually causes more rapid net cooling of the Earth viewed as a system. The warmer the ground temperatures are at night, the more they radiate. The more they are re-warmed by recirculated air the more net energy they radiate away over the course of the night

A rarely remarked on related phenomena is that across England and I believe much of western Europe, from the 1950s many of the hedgerows and small copses of trees were removed to create larger fields more suited to mechanised agriculture.

This would have reduced near ground turbulence, surface warming and loss of heat through radiation. Thus warming the near ground atmosphere. And as this happened progressively over several decades, it would have introduce a warming trend. Hedgerow removal had largely stopped by the 1990s.

Anthony, Wikipedia, as loose some of it’s information is, will not even have William M. Connolley spewing his bad science information laced with insults…. so why is he here? For enlightenment to see how bad AGW badness can get? To have yourself and a multiple of readers and commenters, now included me, insulted right and left because William M. Connolley thinks he is knowledgeable in science and no one else here is? Seems you’ve got a hard decision to make.

William M. Connolley, I gave you your chance in my last comment to be civil and you refused it, insulting again. I’m not going to sit here and play YOUR game. Mods— please play me some leeway in the near future with this jerk.

An idea:
Wind make changes in climate, this article shows it.
There is a weekly change in climate in some places, weekends are different.
This is blamed on aerosols, which is convenient for the warmists, since in gets them off the kook for the lack of warming.
That way, if they can’t get you for CO2, they can get you for creating aerosols, they have you coming and going.
On weekdays, cars rush around to and from work etc, this creates some wind.
This wind may change the climate just like wind farms, or at least somewhat.
Therefore, this article shows that aerosols may be off the hook, completly or partially.
And this is not even counting the other things that could cause this weekly change, such as the heat from all that combustion going on in those cars.

There is no extra heat produced. Under clear skies the surface temperature will drop and create an inversion. Cloudy skies or wind (or turbulence created by wind or turbines) will result in a higher temperature overnight, That is all the study shows.
I knew an owner of a grape growing operation in Ontario who would fly his old airplane early in the morning when there was a danger of frost.

Anthony, Wikipedia, as loose some of it’s information is, will not even have William M. Connolley spewing his bad science information laced with insults…. so why is he here? For enlightenment to see how bad AGW badness can get?
>>>>>>>>

Yes! Everytime I see wmc drawn into discussion of the actual science, he makes a fool of himself, like his comment upthread where he seems to think that putting buildings on land reduces the surface area that can “see” the sky by the area of the building. Highly instructive for those new to the discussion.

Let Connolly post. I need a good belly laugh before going off to bed. Plus it gives me added faith in the educated people who post here from all viewpoints. I am getting a great education in my retirement … Thank you for this open site.

Well no, not quite. Here
it is, and I said “The Policy Lass is sick of arguing with stupid people. Anyone who has been to WUWT and the comment threads there will empathise.” And yes, there are indeed stupid people here, but you aren’t all stupid. Otherwise i wouldn’t be bothering.

> It was then promptly deleted by one of the pseudonym named climate bullies you cavort with. My crime was using my own name….because well, we just can’t have that awful Watts person submitting to Wikipedia.

As I say, I can’t see any evidence that it was deleted. I think you mistook the speedy-delete notice for actual deletion.

Stephen Rasey says:> … Wikipedia on is the history page… But that only works when the root page continues to exist.

As far as I can see, that page does exist (aside: even if the page is deleted, the history remains visible to admins, and can be restored if needed).

> Your description of what happened to the “Climate Reference Network” page illustrates the Achilles’ Heel of Wikipedia

In this case it looks like AW may have erred. Wiki wins again!
REPLY: Actually we both erred, but you won’t admit your error.

1. Mr. Connolley erred in claiming I’ve never contributed to Wikipedia.
[ >What do you mean, “any more”? You never have; and I doubt any of the folks here have. You’d rather sit on the sidelines carping, and inventing excuses for not making things better.]

To paraphease his favorite line, he “made that up”.

2. I erred in not checking again after getting the “speedy deletion” notice, because it caused me to be disgusted with the entire Wikipedia process. Why participate if one person’s opinion can trigger a deletion? Given the behavior problems there, I didn’t bother to even contest it. Why waste my time with anonymous cowards with an agenda?

I think this admonishment from Wikipedia sums up your behavior there quite well, as well as my (and others) reticence for active participation:

William M. Connolley previously sanctioned and desysopped

8.1) In the Abd-William M. Connolley arbitration case (July–September 2009), William M. Connolley was found to have misused his admin tools while involved. As a result, he lost administrator permissions, and was admonished and prohibited from interacting with User:Abd. Prior to that, he was sanctioned in Requests for arbitration/Climate change dispute (2005, revert parole – which was later overturned by the Committee here) and Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Geogre-William M. Connolley (2008, restricted from administrative actions relating to Giano II). He was also the subject of RFC’s regarding his conduct: RfC 1 (2005) and RfC 2 (2008). The 2008 RFC was closed as improperly certified.

Passed 6 to 0 with 2 abstentions, 14:10, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

William M. Connolley has been uncivil and antagonistic

8.2) William M. Connolley has been uncivil and antagonistic to editors within the topic area, and toward administrators enforcing the community probation. (Selection of representative examples:[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] [17][18][19] [20] )

This uncivil and antagonistic behaviour has included refactoring of talk page comments by other users,(examples:[21][22][23] ) to the point that he was formally prohibited from doing so. In the notice advising him that a consensus of 7 administrators had prohibited his refactoring of talk page posts, he inserted commentary within the post of the administrator leaving the notice on his talk page.[24]] For this action, he was blocked for 48 hours; had the block extended to 4 days with talk page editing disabled due to continuing insertions into the posts of other users on his talk page; had his block reset to the original conditions; then was blocked indefinitely with talk page editing disabled when he again inserted comments into the posts of others on his talk page.[25] After extensive discussion at Administrator noticeboard/Incidents, the interpretation of consensus was that the Climate Change general sanctions did not extend to the actions of editors on their own talk pages, and the block was lifted.

Passed 8 to 0, 14:10, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

William M. Connolley’s edits to biographies of living persons

8.5) William M. Connolley has focused a substantial portion of his editing in the Climate change topic area on biographical articles about living persons who hold views opposed to his own with respect to the reality and significance of anthropogenic global warming, in a fashion suggesting that he does not always approach such articles with an appropriately neutral and disinterested point of view.

Passed 7 to 1, 14:10, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

So, after viewing what you are attempting to do with your own blog and interactions here, careful personal consideration, and discussions with other moderators about your behavior at WUWT, it has been decided that like Wikipedia, after 367 Connolley comments and responses, you have been dis-invited from further commentary here. The reason is that you have summarily and regularly violated WUWT policy. While on one hand you have made some valid points, on the other, your behavior here (with follow up taunting on your blog) is serially mendacious, disruptive, dismissive, insulting, and condescending, and as I’ve pointed out the threads Mr. Connolley visits get hijacked by his interaction, making them about him and his taunts. In essence, as you’ve demonstrated on Wikipedia, your participation here is not in good faith either.

To quote WOPR: “The only winning move is not to play.” This is how I feel about Wikipedia and your participation there, and after weighing all the factors, and your participation here. We won’t be playing Mr. Connelley’s war games here anymore. – Anthony Watts

His results of ” a significant warming trend of up to 0.72 °C per decade” are most likely meaningless because the measurement period probably corresponds with the construction period for the wind farm. When construction finishes the temperature rise relative to the surrounding area will level off (assuming that the wind farm remains operational).

The real question should be what effect the redistribution of energy and increase in turbulence has on cloud formation and precipitation downwind of these massive wind farms.

Sorry for the segueway Anthony, but I just wanted to note that the reason I became interested in Climate science, and then became a skeptic is because of William Connolley. Before even CG1 or 2 came about, the antics of Connolley were making news as reputable studies were being peverted, valid data corrupted, and lies told as facts.

That his blog is seldom visited is a symptom of that. That he continues doubling down on his denials of culpability, and then treating readers as stupid (that they cannot read and understand his simple words), only reinforces my belief that AGW is no longer science, but a rellgion of heretics. So let him post. He is your best resource for the truth, because anything he posts, we know is a fabrication.

He is a sad little man. Still looking for that 15 minutes he lost years ago.

“Overall, the warming effect reported in this study is local and is small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature changes. -> Very likely, the wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the air’s heat near the surface <-, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases”.

I think these scientists are correct that wind farms increase temperatures. But I think they have confused the reason.

Stand in front of a fan at any time to understand the truth of this. Get out of a shower, feel how warm you are. Now, stand in front of a fan. You will notice your temperature dropping a great deal!

So there you have it. These wind farms will slow down the wind, which is an important factor in cooling the earth. Slowing down the wind even a tiny amount will increase global temperatures. These wind farms must be stopped!

I’m certain in five years from now, Al Gore’s son will tell us the consequences of relying on Wind power, that Solar has destroyed our deserts, and the only way to get good power is hamsters on a hamster wheel. But only one hamster per household, because the excess C02 output might cause another unacceptable increase in global temperatures.

PORTLAND – The Bonneville Power Administration twice ordered Pacific Northwest wind farms to cut production in recent days because it has a surplus of power from hydroelectric dams.

The agency, which manages much of the power grid in the Northwest, confirmed it issued the orders during the early morning hours of Sunday and Monday, when demand is low.

The action rekindles a dispute from last year, when the agency curtailed wind turbines because the water from a large mountain snowpack left the region with more hydropower than the electrical grid could handle…

Wind-power companies will be reimbursed for lost revenue. But Jan Johnson, a spokeswoman for Iberdrola Renewables, a major wind-power developer, said the shutdowns are unacceptable.

So they get a federal tax credit and are paid whether they produce power or not. No way for customers to escape the higher costs.

davidmhoffer said:
“Suppose you have a lot that is 1000 square meters. You build a building upon it that covers exactly half the lot. What is the surface area that can “see” the sky?”

WMC’s argument is not hard to understand; just because you don’t like him doesn’t mean you should act dense when responding to him. If I have a rectangular lot and I build a building on half of it, half of the lot becomes roof and can see the whole sky; the other half of the lot only sees about half the sky that it did before. If instead I build my building around the edges of the lot with a courtyard in the middle, the courtyard loses almost its entire view of the sky. I don’t have any idea what the magnitude of the resulting effect is, but you shouldn’t act superior to someone if you don’t even understand the point he’s making.

I understood what davidmhoffer was saying. Sorry you didn’t. Hoffer’s building is one mm high. Your building is eight hundred feet high. Either way, what the ground doesn’t see, the roof does. You’re looking straight up either way.

Anyway, referring to WMC is like appealing to the pseudo-science ‘authority’ of Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Smokey, looks like you don’t have a clue, either, unfortunately. A photon emitted from the ground heads up at some angle. If it heads straight up, it maybe escapes the atmosphere relatively quickly. If it heads off at an angle and there are no tall things around, ditto. Now put a tall building next to it; if it heads off in the direction of the building, it necessarily doesn’t escape the atmosphere before running in to something (namely, the building). Thus, the building increases the average amount of time a photon takes to escape. This is a very simple idea. I have no idea if it actually explains UHI (which is WMC’s claim), but evidently neither you nor davidmhoffer can be troubled to understand what the claim is before deciding it must be wrong.

Really, you should go re-read davidmhoffer’s post from which I quoted. It’s abundantly clear that he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about: the question he asks is what portion of the ground can see the sky. The answer is, if you build large buildings, then much less of it can (on average). This is a simple fact of geometry: if you’re on a convex surface and you look above a tangent plane, you can’t see the surface. But if you add texture to your surface, you block lots of lines of sight.

(Note also that this doesn’t involve an appeal to anyone’s authority, it involves an appeal to spending 5 minutes actually thinking about the claims you’re making instead of instinctively lashing out.)

It is what the ground observer can see looking straight up into the sky. NOT what the sky can “see” of the ground, as you mistakenly stated. Thus, the existence of buildings do not make a bit of difference; you’re looking straight up, see?

First of all, how hard is it to get my tag right? Second of all, it’s emphatically not about looking straight up. The ground emits heat in all directions, including angled (i.e., not directly) upwards. It’s this “angled” heat that’s being blocked by buildings. The cutting off of the horizon is what’s under discussion here. Building large buildings cuts off the average amount of sky visible from the ground; this increases the length of the average radiative path from the ground to the top of the atmosphere.

Actually, it is about looking straight up. Maybe you missed the previous discussions here concerning using an IR camera to measure downwelling IR by looking straight up. That is the only way to get an accurate reading, otherwise by looking at the horizon, you are looking through many more miles of atmosphere, which skews the readings. I suggest spending some time reading the WUWT archives, before commenting on this particular point. Otherwise you’ll come across as clueless as billy connolley.

It’s not clear at all to me why you think an old discussion about a different phenomenon is relevant here. Indeed, downwelling IR coming straight down doesn’t care whether it hits a flat roof or the flat ground. But this is unrelated to the question of how IR being radiated from the ground behaves, what direction it goes in, and what blocks it. I’m kind of shocked that you haven’t even reached the point of understanding what the question is yet, but perhaps I shouldn’t be — after all, you can’t even seem to master the art of typing in my handle correctly ;).

By the way, your throwaway about WMC is really silly: if you were actually reading my posts, you would have figured out that I don’t have any idea whether his claims are correct, because to know that would require a person to do a lot of fairly serious math that I certainly haven’t done. All I’ve pointed out is that davidmhoffer decided to take a swing at WMC without even understanding WMC’s argument; similarly, you have now picked up davidmhoffer’s banner without understanding even a little bit the position you’re trying to disprove. It seems to me that, this being a science blog and all, you should time would be better spent explaining to someone like edbarbar how completely, tragically, embarrassingly wrong he is than arguing with me.

Gosh, I hope you’re right about edbarbar — that would restore some of my faith in humanity. Two silly questions: 1) what do you think the “tell” is that I should have picked up on? 2) Who do you think his joke is mocking?

Everybody seem to missing the elephant in the room, wind farms do cause global warming but not buy the mixing method.
Essentially wind farms work by taking power from the air flows which cool the earth, these are the air flows which allow warm air to rise and cool and cooler air to fall to the ground.
When you slow that process you get warming.
We humans actually use a similar process to stay warm, but we raise hairs on our body to trap air not wind mills. It’s pretty basic stuff but has been over looked.

Apologies for being lazy in typing your screen name. Also, I don’t get the “tell” comment and I’m still too lazy to search for it. But regarding edbarbar’s comment:

“I’m certain in five years from now, Al Gore’s son will tell us the consequences of relying on Wind power, that Solar has destroyed our deserts, and the only way to get good power is hamsters on a hamster wheel. But only one hamster per household, because the excess C02 output might cause another unacceptable increase in global temperatures.”

A “tell” is a poker term professional players use. It is a mannerism, or inflection that indicates when a player is bluffing. The best players are always looking for the “tell” of an opponent to gain an advantage. In the case used here, look it up was sarcastically asking how you could “tell” that edbarbar was joking.

philjourdan, thanks for the translation. I was using “tell” in the sense of “that which gives away”, i.e., I was asking what part of edbarbar’s post indicates that it’s a joke, rather than an argument intended in seriousness. (It seems to me that esboella is making the essentially the same, horribly wrong, argument. But I don’t think esboella is joking, do you?)